


Leap of Faith

by soroga



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-19 05:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22705834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soroga/pseuds/soroga
Summary: Haley's going to find a way back to Phantagica no matter what. But she'd really like if her family came with her, too.
Relationships: Kid Who Saved Fantasyland & Their Family They’re Trying to Convince To Move There
Comments: 13
Kudos: 23
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Leap of Faith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).



Haley starts her campaign with Luke. 

At least theoretically, he should be the softest target. He’s _obsessed_ with those Magic Tree House books, even though they’re a million years old. He buys every Fortnite skin that’s even slightly wizard-themed. But when she very subtly brings up her experiences in Phantagica while he plays Animal Jam on their shared tablet, he gives her the coldest stare imaginable.

“You’re still talking about that?” He asks, unimpressed, as he jabs through two warnings about insecure Flash Player without looking. 

“Of course I’m still talking about it,” Haley responds, stung. She’s not sure how she could ever _stop_. If Luke had any idea what it was like flying on the back of a dragon, or being given a tour of the Sengi Ice Castle by a living snowstorm, he’d never give her a look like that. 

But of course, Luke _doesn’t_ have any idea. And when Haley tries to give him one, he snorts and turns back to his stupid big-eyed rhino character, clearly dismissing her. 

Haley wants to shove him over the arm of the couch, but her experiences in Phantagica have taught her restraint. (Besides, the last time she did that, Luke immediately went crying to their mom.) So instead she says, “I’m going to report you to Fortnite and get your account banned! You’re not old enough to be on there!” And stomps away. 

Next, she tries Amanda.

Or she tries to try Amanda. It is really, _really_ hard to get Amanda alone. The only time Haley sees her is at breakfast and dinner, and she knows the second she tries to bring it up there, everyone’s going to agree with each other that she’s crazy and it’ll go nowhere. The rest of the time, Amanda hides in her room and doesn’t talk to anyone.

She’s used to Amanda being impossible to find. Even when they rode the bus together in elementary school, Amanda always made her sit at least three rows away from her. And now that Amanda’s in high school while Haley’s stuck in sixth grade, bored to tears converting fractions to decimals and back again when she should be trooping through Phantagica’s forests with Lvir, Amanda has less reason to interact with her than ever. 

But whatever. Haley’s used to Amanda not liking her. So it’s no big deal to knock on Amanda’s closed bedroom door. And then knock again. And then keep knocking, because she can and will be annoying enough that Amanda can’t ignore her, if that’s what it takes. 

Eventually, she hears someone moving around in there, and then the sound of Amanda unlocking the door. (Amanda’s the only one who has a lock. She’d asked for one as a moving-in present from Mom, glaring at Haley the whole time she did, even though Haley hasn’t taken anything out of her room in _months_.) 

“What?” Amanda says as she cracks the door open an inch, not even wide enough for Haley to wedge her foot in the gap. 

“I just wanted to talk,” Haley says innocently.

The door closes in her face. 

Haley takes a gamble. “I know you’re wearing eyeliner,” she says. “I’ll tell Mom!” 

There’s a pause.

The door opens. Haley darts through before Amanda can change her mind.

Amanda _is_ wearing eyeliner, winged slightly unevenly on her top lids and smeared on her bottom. “You’re going to give yourself an eye infection,” Haley says automatically, because that’s what her mom says all the time.

Amanda scowls. “No one gets eye infections from eyeliner or people wouldn’t wear it,” she says. “Mom’s just old. She doesn’t get the e-girl aesthetic at all.” 

Haley isn’t sure she does, either. As far as she can tell, the only thing that has changed about Amanda recently is that all her t-shirts are black now, and she keeps trying to wear makeup even though their mom doesn’t like it. 

But Haley has bigger things to think about than makeup. “You know, in Phantagica, you’d already be an adult,” she says. 

Amanda’s mouth does something she mostly suppresses as she turns away from Haley, picking her phone up. “Oh yeah?” She turns the screen on for a second to check for notifications, then quickly off again when she sees nothing’s there. 

Is she laughing at her? Haley can’t tell, but she persists anyway. “Yeah,” she says. “I got to travel all over without anyone looking at me weirdly.” Well – they looked at her weirdly, but that was because she didn’t have horns or wings, not because she was a kid. “I got to go wherever I wanted to go, do whatever I wanted to do...and I made a ton of friends, too! Everywhere I went.” 

Amanda turns back, and she’s not laughing at all. “Are you saying I’m bad at making friends?” Amanda asks.

What? “No! I was just saying it’s really easy to make friends in Phantagica. Everyone’s so nice there.” Except the evil cult of cat sorcerers, but she doesn’t have to mention them.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter what she mentions. “I can make friends anywhere,” Amanda snarls. “How about you stop eavesdropping on my conversations with mom like a little creep and go away?” 

“But – ”

“Get _out_!” Amanda shrieks. 

Haley gets out. Amanda slams the door shut behind her. 

Haley stares at the closed door for a long moment. She wants to say something cool and get the last word, but she doesn’t have anything to say. She wasn’t even the one who said cool things to get the last word in Phantagica, either. 

She feels her face screw up, and just like that, she’s crying. She scrubs at her eyes, mad at herself for crying and mad at Amanda for making her cry, as she drags herself down the hall.

She runs into Luke, because of course she does. He’s focused on the tablet still as he walks towards his room, but he lowers his arm when he sees her. “Why are you crying?” He asks. 

Haley wants to tell him to shut up and go away, too, but what comes out instead is, “I miss Lvir!” 

And then she’s outright sobbing, right there in the hall. Because she _does_ miss Lvir. She misses the way Lvir’s ears would twitch when she got annoyed, and how disgusted she’d get with the stuff Haley ate, and the way she always had something cool and witty to say, even when they were running away from hungry dragons or Lvir’s evil family. 

Lvir is her best friend, and she might never see her again, because she might _never go to Phantagica again_.

Haley tilts her head back and wails.

“Uh – ” Luke pats her shoulder frantically. “It’s okay! It’s okay! Do you want a tissue? – I’m going to bring you a tissue,” he says, and then he scrambles away. 

Haley keeps crying a little longer, but eventually she starts to feel kind of dumb about it. She wants to wallow in how sad she is, but she’s too aware that she’s just kind of making a lot of noise and snot while standing around in the middle of their boringly normal hall to get into it. By the time Luke makes it back, she’s crying a lot more quietly, and she takes the tissuebox out of his hands to clean her face. “Thanks,” she sniffs.

“Sure,” Luke says, staring at her. He pats her shoulder again, lingering there awkwardly like he’s not sure if he’s supposed to hug her or not. “I’m sorry you miss Elf Ear,” he finally says instead. “That, uh. That must be hard.” 

“Her name is _Lvir_ ,” Haley says. “She’s not an elf, she’s a cat, and she’s my _friend_.” Then she blows her nose. She stuffs that tissue in her pocket, then grabs another to blow her nose again. 

By the time she’s done, she’s feeling a little better. Luke, on the other hand, is looking even more disturbed, but he bravely soldiers on. “I’m sorry you miss Elvear,” he tries. “I hope you get to see your friend again.” 

“Yeah,” Haley says. “Me too.”

By the time their mom gets home with pizza, Haley’s feeling a lot more normal, and also kind of silly. She’s the heiress to Firestorm Castle and nearly a teenager besides. She can’t lose it like that. Obviously, the best case scenario for her is if she can convince her family to go live in Phantagica with her, but even if they don’t, she’s going to go back _eventually_. She’ll be able to drive a car by herself in four years. She can take her mom’s and drive it straight through the portal. Then they’ll see. 

Or maybe she can take the car now? She doesn’t know how to drive, but it can’t be that hard. She usually wins when she and Luke play Mario Kart, and she learned way harder things in Phantagica. 

She plots at the table, because their mom makes them have dinner together, while Luke complains about soccer practice and Amanda sits there with her arms crossed. 

“ – and I _told_ him I played sweeper on my old team, but he won’t listen to me!” Luke says. 

“If he wants you to play midfield, you’re going to have to give it a shot,” their mom says back patiently. “Amanda, Haley, what’s the matter? You’ve barely touched your food.” 

“Nothing, mom,” Haley says, and folds her slice like a taco to shove half of it in her mouth at once so she can’t be expected to contribute any more to the conversation. Maybe she can take a rideshare to where the portal is? She can pretend to be thirteen or whatever the minimum rider age for that is, right? She doesn’t have a phone yet, but she can totally steal Amanda’s while she’s sleeping. And then she can text her mom right before she goes through the portal, and her mom will rush after her, and – 

“You said you had a lot of friends in Phantagica, right?” Amanda blurts out. 

Haley chokes on her pizza. 

“Oh, honey – ” Their mom gets up so fast her chair scrapes the tile. “Here, let me get you some water.” 

Haley flaps her hand to say it’s okay, managing to swallow what’s in her mouth. It then sits uncomfortably in her throat, because she barely chewed it, so she swallows again until she feels a little less like she has a golf ball stuck in there. “It’s fine, I’m fine,” she says. Then she stares at Amanda, because, _what_?

Amanda doesn’t stare back. She’s looking down at her plate, where she has indeed not touched her pizza at all. She always scrubs the eyeliner off before Mom gets home, but this time Haley sees bits of it still stuck near the corner of her eyes, like she was distracted while she was getting rid of it tonight. “I just, you said you had a lot of friends, so I thought if you wanted to tell us about them, that might be cool,” she mumbles. Haley keeps staring. Amanda’s shoulders hunch. “Or not, it’s fine.” 

Their mom comes back to the table cautiously, like she’s approaching a wild animal. “You want to talk about...Phantagica?” She says delicately.

Luke blows out a sarcastic breath, then copies Haley’s method and takes a bite of his pizza so he can’t be expected to say anything else, chewing obnoxiously. Amanda finally looks up at Haley, like, _this is what you wanted, right?_

A dinner conversation was the last thing she wanted, actually. She’d been sure everyone would gang up on her. But now it’s here, and it looks like everyone just wants to let her talk. 

Wow. Who knew all she had to do this whole time was cry a little? 

So Haley takes in a deep breath, and she talks about how cool Lvir is, and how quick on her paws she is, and how she never lets Haley feel lame or slow in comparison no matter what. She talks about the Queen of Wyrm Island and her obsession with giving Haley gifts, leaving out the part where she tried to eat Haley first. She talks about Firestorm, the Lady of Firestorm Castle, who told Haley she was clever and brave and would always have a place in Phantagica. 

She talks about Giri, and Hops, and the Dark Dawn. She talks and talks, and the whole time, her mom wears the same careful expression, Luke stuffs his face, and Amanda looks down at her plate.

Finally, she’s out of things to say. All she can do is look hopelessly at her mom.

She kind of expects her to say _you should write a book!_ like Dad had, the one time she’d said something to him. But instead she says, “I know this is really important to you.”

Haley’s not sure if that’s better or worse. “But you don’t believe me,” she finishes.

Her mom purses her lips. “You believe it,” she says. “And I believe...that what you believe matters.” Haley rolls her eyes, but her mom continues, “what do you want to do about it?” 

For a second, Haley’s not sure she heard right. “What?” She asks, dumbfounded. Luke and Amanda look just as confused.

“What you believe matters,” their mom repeats. “So if this...Phantagica...is a place we can help you go, I want to know how we can do that.” 

Haley’s pretty sure she means “help you” in the sense of painting a cute fairyland backdrop for the living room so Haley can pretend in there, but she grabs the opportunity anyway.

“I want to go back to the stream by our old house,” she says. “There’s a portal there that opens up right by the Sengi Ice Castle. It’ll be really cold this time of year, but the Dark Dawn lives there, and they’ll let us rent some ravens – ” 

She stops, because it’s pretty clear their mom stopped listening at the word “portal.” If anything, that careful look has increased. “Honey, you know when we go back to the old house, Dad won’t be there, right?”

“Wha – ” Haley frowns, indignant. “ _Duh_ , Mom. He moved out when I was like _five_. I don’t have, like, divorce trauma or something. And even if I did, it’d be for IHOPs, not our old house.” That’s where Dad liked to take them on their once-a-month visits, right up until they’d moved a few months ago.

Haley likes their dad. He’s fine. But she’s also fine just seeing him once a month at an IHOP, and what she really misses from their old town is the portal to Phantagica. 

“Well...” Haley can’t believe this. Mom is _caving_. Caving so completely, in fact, that she says, “we’ll have to pick a weekend where no one is busy doing anything.” 

“I don’t have anything this weekend,” Amanda volunteers. 

Haley can’t believe she has ever had a single bad thought about Amanda in her life. She kicks Amanda under the table to make her look at her and smiles to let her know they’re totally cool. Amanda smiles, too, and kicks back. 

Luke can’t read a room, so he says, “I have a soccer game.”

“You don’t even _like_ playing soccer,” Haley hisses. “You just finished whining about it an hour ago!” 

Their mom pulls out her phone. “Well, next weekend I have a conference...the weekend after that is the bake sale at Haley and Luke’s school...the weekend after that Luke has another game...”

“Oh my god,” Amanda mutters. 

_Tablet_ , Haley mouths frantically to Luke. _It’s yours._

“Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t need to go to my soccer game!” Luke says brightly. “I have another one just a couple weeks later. And I probably need more practice before I’m ready to play midfield in a real game.” 

Their mom frowns at Haley, unimpressed. “What?” Haley asks, scandalized that she could be accused of anything here. 

Their mom sighs. “Fine,” she says. “We’ll skip the soccer game. It’s a four hour drive, so we’ll leave Saturday at 8 am sharp and have lunch there. —Oh, we can go to the Thai place on 10th Street,” she adds, looking much more pleased all of a sudden. 

Haley jumps up, whooping, and runs out of the room.

“Haley! Come back and finish your dinner!” Mom yells.

Haley pops her head back in. “I’m just gonna do a lap around the house and then I’ll be back!” She shouts, and she takes off, cackling madly.

She can’t stop bouncing the rest of the week. She knocks over the carton of orange juice at breakfast the next morning and Amanda gives her a dirty look, like _I can’t believe I helped you._

But that can’t touch her! Haley’s going back! And so is her family, and of course she’s going to give them the greatest tour imaginable, and they’re going to be so thrilled they’ll want to move into Firestorm Castle that very day – 

Actually, maybe when they land in Sengi, Haley can sneak off to send a message warning Firestorm to hide Haley’s collection of poisons before they get there. 

It’s a nice, temperate spring in this little piece of Earth, but Sengi’s going to be _freezing_ , so Haley digs their winter gear out of storage. Their mom catches her when she’s packing them in a couple suitcases and makes her unpack them to try it all on, which ends up being smart because Luke’s snow boots don’t fit him anymore and Amanda refuses to wear anything that isn’t black or gray. 

“I’m guessing you want me to run out and buy new winter gear this week,” their mom says, completely unimpressed. 

Haley immediately resorts to begging: “If we don’t use them you can return them! I’ll come with you to buy them! I’ll wash the car! I’ll do the dishes for two weeks!”

Their mom looks briefly tempted to take her up on it before pointing out that Luke and Amanda would need new snow gear by the time winter came around anyway, which Haley had completely forgotten since she assumes they’ll all be living in Phantagica by then anyway. But she thanks their mom as earnestly as she can, and then she’s dashing off to figure out what else they’ll need to bring with them. 

Finally, the day arrives. Haley didn’t sleep a wink last night, but she still skips her way into the car. Luke follows at a more grumpy pace, tablet already in hand, and they slide into the backseat together while Amanda and their mom climb into the front.

“I’m just saying, in another year I’ll almost be old enough to get my permit,” Amanda is arguing. “Wouldn’t it be better if I got some experience behind the wheel now?”

“If Amanda gets to drive, I get to drive too!” Haley blurts out.

“No one else is driving,” their mom sighs. “Everyone have their seatbelts on?” 

Then they’re off. The excitement that carried Haley through the week is going to make her explode if given four hours of sitting and doing nothing to build up, so she turns to Luke. “Can I take my turn with the tablet first?” 

“What turn with the tablet?” Luke says in his snottiest voice. “It’s mine now, remember?” 

Their mom is focusing all her attention on the road. Amanda’s on her phone, playing some dumb game where she pretends to date cartoon people. Haley’s going to die with nothing to do for four hours.

Instead, after twenty minutes of staring out the window, she somehow manages to fall asleep and miss the whole drive.

Except then their mom insists on getting lunch, and Luke and Amanda agree, even though there is literally a portal to a magical kingdom _twenty miles away_. Haley hates everything. (Haley still eats all the spicy noodles, because they’re really good.) 

But finally, _finally_ , they make it back. Back to the stream in the woods behind the house Haley grew up in, back to the place that leads to her real home. 

“Luke, put the tablet in its case before you walk into a tree,” their mom says, exasperated. “Amanda, don’t wander off, and don’t drop the suitcase, it’ll get filthy.” 

“I wasn’t wandering off, I just wanted to check where there’s a signal!” 

Haley tunes them all out. She dips her hand into the stream, feeling the cold water rush over her fingers. She’d thought there was something magical about this stream when she was really little, before she ever stumbled upon the portal. She hadn’t been wrong.

“Well, Haley, we’re here,” their mom says, looking around disinterestedly. She’s never really liked the outdoors. “What do you want to do now?” 

“Just look,” Haley says, pointing. 

Their mom looks. Amanda looks. Even Luke drops the stick he picked up somewhere and looks. 

Amanda lets out an annoyed sigh and looks away first, crossing her arms. Luke follows immediately after. Their mom keeps looking, long enough that Amanda starts looking again with her just for something to do. 

Finally, their mom says, “Haley, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be – ”

The afternoon light hits through the trees just right to catch on something in the center of the stream, and her mom opens her mouth wide. 

“Haley,” she says, “what _is_ that?” 

“Oh my god,” Amanda says.

“What?” Luke asks, finally looking up and squinting again. “I don’t see it! Where am I supposed to be looking?” 

Haley grins. She opens her arms up, takes a running start, and _leaps_ her way home.


End file.
